Count to a Trillion (16 page)

Montrose said nothing.

Del Azarchel leaned back in his chair, looking saddened. “But even so, I would not have allowed the Conclave to relieve him of command, had I known how despondent he was, or what would follow.”

Montrose did not like the sound of that. “What followed?”

“He took his own life. I do not have your admiration for the heathen religion he joined: They are prone to burning themselves, these Brahmins, when they crave their fabled return on the wheel of reincarnation.”

“But he was a Frenchy.”

“Monegasque. And yet ideas have no race: He was Brahmin because he thought as Brahmins do. Captain Grimaldi dressed himself in splendid garb, adorned with liquid-crystals as with jewels, turned up the oxygen gain in his chamber, and sealed the hatch. He was thoughtful enough to evacuate the surrounding chambers of air, so the blaze could not spread. It was a gaseous fire, since there was nothing else to burn except lightweight plastic cabin-fixtures, and so smothered itself as quickly as it flared up—almost more like an explosion than a fire, burning in all directions at once in a confined, perfectly insulated space. I sorrow to think that he condemned himself to a more eternal fire, and have said more than one mass for his soul. I may say another tomorrow, before dawn. You are welcomed to join me. I have the Pope on my staff.”

Montrose was about to say no thanks, that he was no sort of praying man, but then again, he remembered how he once thought it was not right to have a man not buried proper with no words said over him, as if he was a dead dog or something. “Yeah. I think I will join you.”

7

Posthuman Technology

1. The Cold Gray Room

Technicians in parkas were trooping out of the chamber as they entered. More than a few minutes were spent in introductions, explanations of the procedures, and some consultations with Del Azarchel over technical matters meaningless to Montrose.

The chamber was hollowed out of the middle of a molecular rod-logic diamond the size of a warehouse: The walls, ceiling, and floor were paneled in absorptive fabric the color of a pigeon’s wing. Out from the walls came bundles of colored fibers, which where stapled to black cylinders occupying the center of the room. The whole thing had a surprisingly clumsy, half-finished look.

Menelaus stood in his parka, his breath a cloud of steam before him, aching. Del Azarchel sat impassively behind him, his hands tucked into a muff, his legs covered with a white coverlet.

“Where’s the brain?”

“We’re inside it.”

“Not as tidily packed-up as a human brain, then. Where’s the controls?”

Del Azarchel wheeled over to the nearest wall, and tapped on the surface, to bring up an image of a standard key-screen and scratch pad. “The wall surface is motion-sensitive and follows standard finger-gestures. You can extend the range from contact to the middle of the room. Make fists to null the monkey-see-monkey-do. Otherwise you will flip the view each time your scratch your nose. If you rub your thumb against your index finger, the walls-sensors interpret that as a trackball. Draw your fingers apart to expand the view. If you’d like a stool, the technicians keep them piled in a corner, along with elbow-rests.”

“I’ll stand. Before I start it, how do I stop it?”

“Spoken like an astronaut. Salute with two fingers for the Halt gesture. Clasp your hands palm to palm to crash out of the program.”

Montrose made the standard library-gesture for Open, which was to touch all four fingers to his thumb, making a circle. Immediately the four walls, and the ceiling, vanished into a pearly gray void. The floor was like a raft on an endless ocean of dizzying fog. Montrose realized all four walls, plus the ceiling, were coated with library cloth.

“Neutral setting is giving me a headache,” said Montrose.

“Cross your fingers for R. That gives you the
Review
command.”

Suddenly one part of the ocean of nothingness was painted with a system of diagrams.

It was a diagram of a neural process. Menelaus found he could finger-snap through the views and magnifications, or slide the screens left and right with a handwave. At highest magnification, he could see the specific equations generating the lines of code that were compiling into a symbolic matrix. There were hundreds of matrices, thousands, millions, intertwined like some vast tree, or, rather, like the circulatory system of some irregular cloud.

At the lowest magnification was … a mask. It was a crystalline face, made of hard planes of light, with dots and crosshairs to indicate eyeball directions and motions.

Del Azarchel’s face. It was a simplified version, smooth-shaven, with skin like plastic. There was no skull, nothing above the hairline and nothing behind the ears.

It was staring at him. It raised its eyebrow in that typical way of Del Azarchel’s and gave him a polite, if aloof, nod of recognition.

Menelaus said, “It’s—the damn thing is looking at me. I mean, heh, it
looks
like it is looking at me. Damnification! Almost looks alive.”

The pale lips moved. Speakers in walls carried the voice stereophonically. “Alive? Ah, my friend, you could say that. And such a life!”

The pinpoint eyes looked past Menelaus’s shoulder, turned toward the seated Del Azarchel. The gaze was sardonic. “A happy life, I suppose, for I exist without pain or hunger or want—without lust or love—but, alas, a life that is too brief. Ironic, if you consider the point of this exercise is to grasp for life, endless life.”

Menelaus yanked his hands together as if he were swatting a fly, a loud clap. As if banished by the noise, the cold and superhuman face was gone, and the walls of the room were once more a dull gray void.

“You copied yourself?”

Del Azarchel said, “The seed system modeled my every braincell, down to the molecular level. Whatever my brain did, it did. The thing we humans do not understand, the way the immaterial mind is connected to the matter in the brain, I simply copied it. Ah! And to elevate my copied self to posthumanity, I also copied this.”

Del Azarchel tapped the red amulet on his wrist, and streams of patterned data flowed along the walls.

Montrose said, “I know that part of the Monument well. Delta 81 through 117. It is what I used to make the Zurich computer runs.”

Del Azarchel smiled and inclined his head. “I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I copied not only your work but your approach. I copied segments of the Monument math, treating as algebraic unknowns the values I could not translate. Due to your work, I was able to make a perfect copy of myself—as myself. To augment the copy into posthumanity, ah! There I had the simulated molecules introduced into the simulated braincells of the simulated brain, to do just what you had done to you. Your Prometheus Formula: I imitated the effects electronically. Unlike you, however, I had more than one try.”

To Montrose’s surprise, grim sorrow clouded Del Azarchel’s face.

He continued: “I was each and every one of them. Closer than any twin brother could be: starting from a perfect replica, thought for thought like me, developing into areas I could not follow! And each time, one at a time, knowing it might end in madness and death, they asked, no, they demanded the experiment proceed. Such brave brothers I lost!” Now he laughed, and turned away, wiping his cheek brusquely to hide a tear. “I suppose it is mere arrogance of me to admire a copy of myself, is it not? But I felt I died each time one trial run had to be shut down.”

Montrose looked at the equipment around him. “I don’t understand.”

“Shutdown is death.”

“Can’t you just restore any copy from tape back-up, or whatever it is called? Don’t you make daily snapshots?”

“Xypotechnology is not like digital computing. It involves dynamic process. The thought-structure of the human mind, the biological structure of the human brain, is time-related. Remember, the simulation here is an analogue: if, in real life, a human brain just
stopped
and every molecule ceased moving, the brain information is lost. The information about the size and position and location of the atoms and molecules of the brain might not be lost, but that information would no longer contain a pattern of embedded information.”

“Why did you pick yourself as the subject?”

Del Azarchel raised his face, and there was a note of pride in his voice. “I seek deathlessness. A single assassin’s bolt could do me in, and all my plans and dreams die with me. I wish my dreams to live, even if I die.”

“But it won’t be you.”

“True, as far as I am concerned, but to him—he will think himself me. It will be my legacy: a son closer than any son.”

“You are making a world-ruler. A permanent version of yourself.”

Del Azarchel did not deny it. He said, “Without a machinery of immortality, the human race is too short-lived and short-sighted to retain the world peace I have provided. My desire is that the race survive at any cost, to any length, preserved in thought even if not in body. The question is whether that is your dream as well?”

Montrose stared thoughtfully at data patterns shining along the walls. “I don’t suppose star colonization is very practical without some sort of higher machine intelligence to help out. Compared to the animals on Earth, we’re a long-lived race. Compared to the distances we have to travel and the time spans we have to endure, if we are going to have the stars, we’re not.”

Del Azarchel had a stiff, expressionless expression on his face.

“What is it?” Montrose asked.

Del Azarchel merely shook his head, and would not meet his eye. Montrose almost did not recognize the look, since he had never seen it on Del Azarchel’s face before. The look of a man with a bad conscience. A look of guilt.

“You want to tell me what is wrong here?” He meant what was wrong with Del Azarchel.

Del Azarchel answered a different question. “As with you—divarication. The brain structure demotes self-awareness.”

“Why can’t you cure him the way you cured me?”

Del Azarchel smiled a half smile. “Labor disputes. Or a lover’s spat.”

“Come again?”

Del Azarchel shook his head. “I thought you would know better than—Ah, I thought you would know best precisely what the Zurich runs had done, which brain structures had been changed and how—this is, after all, your work.”

Montrose started paging through the information glittering from the walls.

2. Something to Warm You

Some time later he said, “Blackie, I think I have something!”

“An answer?”

“Answer? Plague, no. You crazy? I have outlined a preliminary order of research, a place were you can get hordes of undergraduates and out-of-work data arts professors to
start
working. In a few months or a few years, after you have solved certain insoluble problems, we can look at the issue again, and start thinking about the next logical step. There are some exciting possibilities here.”

“Years?”

“I am an optimist. I should’ve said ‘decades.’ You did not think I performed the Zurich supercomputer runs in my head? It took months of computer time, running continuously, and Ranier had hired a staff to help.”

Del Azarchel looked somewhat blank-faced.

Montrose laughed aloud. “What the pox you thinking, Blackie? That I would walk in here with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and just write down the answer for you?”

Del Azarchel brought out a flask and a silver cup from a compartment beneath his seat. “I am under certain time constraints I have not mentioned to you. My fiancée is in transit right now, and out of radio communication, and I had hoped to, ah, surprise her. Would you care for a drink? Something to warm you.”

“If you can get her to wait eight months, and you give me the kind of computer team Prince Ranier put together, I can do it. He bought those Zurich runs for me. You know he was as rich as Croesus, don’t you? His whole country was nothing but a cross between a casino and a smuggler’s bank. I figure you got more resources than him.”

Del Azarchel offered him a slender silver cup. “I have resources beyond what he imagined. Drink.”

Montrose raised the cup to his lips, and paused without tasting it. “You old dog! Did you say you had a fiancée?”

Del Azarchel looked at once proud and shy, like a man who wants to boast, but dares not. “You mentioned how much a ladies’ man I was in my wasted youth—in hindsight, I cannot tell you how I regret that. I wish I had never touched another woman, never looked at any other, so that I could be all for her! If she wanted it, I would give her the world!”

Montrose grinned, ignoring the drink in his hand. “Who is she?”

“Prince Ranier’s daughter, Rania.”

“Eh? Did he have a kid before he left? But that was a hundred fifty years ago!”

“She spent a good deal of time in suspended animation. And I must tell you, all the others who sued for her hand, D’Aragó, de Ulloa, and i illa d’Or—everyone onboard was in love with her—heh, I suppose it is easy to be head over heels in zero gee!—but no one else won her.” A boyish glee, like inner fire, burned in him, and Montrose saw the young man he remembered from what to him was merely a yesterday ago, now like a ghost possessing the silver-haired cripple he saw today.

“What? Is the
Hermetic
still aloft? Are you planning another expedition? Sign me up!”

“No further human expeditions are planned.”

“We’ll have to change that!”

“Unlikely. In any case, the
Hermetic
is kept in-system, for maintenance of our power.”

“Energy power or political power?”

“The two are linked. Contraterrene cannot be allowed on Earth or near it: even the inner system is too crowded with terrene-matter particles for safety. The
Hermetic
alone has the magnetic-field tools needed to herd the antimatter packets into transplutonian orbits, and the drive to reach the outer system.”

“What about building another ship, then? Ain’t you got the riches?”

“More than enough! The
Bellerophon
was christened and towed to launch orbit five years ago. She merely awaits her crew.”